(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for intellectually processing an information and an apparatus for carrying out the method and, in particular, a method for building knowledge base and an intellectual information processing device used in solving problems.
The objective of this disclosure is to propose a new computer system which is truly intelligent and behaves like a person at problem solving. Here the term problem solving is used in a very wide sense to mean every activity to derive answer meeting given conditions in a given environment.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
There have been a lot of systems which have been called intelligent. The inventor however does not know any truly intelligent system. A person can develop computer programs, for example, because he/she is truly intelligent. There is no such a system that can do in the same way as the person. As a goal of this research therefore, the inventor intends to develop a system that can develop computer program as a person does.
There is a big difference in the organization and the functional characteristics between person and computer. For some specific problems computers have larger problem solving capability than individual persons. However these computers become unable to solve a problem if the problem itself or some condition based on which the computer program was developed change even slightly. A computer program as a problem solver is compared to a very thin rigid wire connecting the start and goal of a given problem without capability of self adjusting. Even with this rigid characteristic a computer program can reach a goal at a long distance from the start if the program is carefully made and no change occurs. But making such computer programs is itself a problem of a different type which cannot be solved by the computer program itself. That is, this style of problem solving can cover only a special type of problems.
Persons on the other hand can adapt to the change of the situations to a large extent. With the similar metaphor as applied to computers, problem solving by persons is like a broad and flexible belt with capability of adjusting itself to direct toward goal. Collaboration of persons is much easier with this adaptability while collaboration of two or more problem solvers of which at least one is a computer program is not easy. The total power of persons who collaborate for solving problems, i.e. both the depth (the scale and complexity of problems to be solved) and breadth (diversity of problems to be solved), is far greater than that of a computer program, even though an individual person has less power than elaborated computer programs have for specific problem solving.
Thus the largest difference between persons and computers in problem solving is the adaptability to different and changing situations, i.e., autonomy in solving rather complex problems (not toy-level problems including programming) and generality to include the wide range of activities in the actual scope. If computer systems happen to acquire both generality and autonomy in solving real problems without other's help, then the systems will be able to collaborate with other systems and/or persons to create greater power.
Generality and autonomy were the objectives of expert system design. But most of the expert systems which have been developed so far showed generality and autonomy only in a limited extent. This is due to the lack of the consideration on making computers truly intelligent and, as the result, the software architecture of these systems were too simple to give them generality and autonomy. In addition to expert systems some attempts were made to develop intelligent systems such as electronic secretary systems. The same characteristics are required to these systems as discussed above but no substantial discussion has been made on the way of building such systems.